Mutagenesis of Cysteine 280 of the Reverse Transcriptase of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type-1: The Effects on the Ribonuclease H Activity

Abstract

Retroviral reverse transcriptases (RTs) have both DNA polymerase and ribonuclease H (RNase H) activities. The RT of human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) is composed of two subunits. The p51, which is the smaller subunit, shares with the larger p66 subunit the same amino-terminal part (which encompasses the DNA polymerase domain) and lacks the carboxyl-terminal segment of the p66 (which is the RNase H domain). The structure of the polymerase domain of HIV-1 RT resembles a right hand (with fingers, palm and thumb subdomains) linked to the RNase H domain. Chemical modifications by thiol-specific reagents of cysteine 280, located in α helix I in the thumb subdomain of the polymerase domain, affect substantially only the RNase H activity. Also, the substitution of a serine for C280 did not alter any of the RT activities. Here we have systematically modified the C280 residue to either of the following residues: W, P, H, L, M, Y, Q, E or R. Only the first two mutations lead to a marked reduction in the RNase H activity, whereas none of the mutations affected the polymerase function to a significant extent. As expected, due to their impaired RNase H, the C280W and C280P mutants also had a very low DNA strand-transfer activity. It is also apparent from subunit-directed mutagenesis that each of the RT subunits contributes to the level of RNase H activity, yet the contribution of the p51 subunit to this activity is somewhat higher than that of the p66. Steady-state kinetic analyses have indicated that the RNase H activity was reduced mainly due to the sharp increase in the K m rather than changes in the k cat values. This suggests that the modifications of C280 lead to an impaired affinity of HIV-1 RT towards the RNA–DNA substrate.